Week 6



Cookbook-to-Inquiry articles


This week's inquiry presentation:


These are all excellent guides for developing your activities. They provide a variety of tips and examples for activity conversion as well as useful guidelines for determining whether your activity is inquiry-based. I will be using this information in my final assessment of the inquiry elements of your activity.








General Safety Resources


This week's presentation on general science classroom safety:


Your performance on the safety pre-test indicates that you have a pretty good background in basic lab safety. Our in-class discussions will summarize these issues and discuss in more detail those that are less familiar to you.

Here's a newspaper article that should scare you (and for good reason):



Now that I have your attention, here are some written resources to aid you in becoming a safe science teacher.

One of the best safety resources out there is FLINN Scientific. Their catalog is a great reference to have on your shelf. They have an excellent collection of Material Safety Data Sheets online as well.

This is a good general safety guide:


These articles have extensive lists of classroom safety rules that are worth reviewing:





To show you how complex safety rules can be, here is a copy of the California state teacher safety manual (all 191 pages). Obviously I don't expect you, or anyone else, to sit down and read this, but it can be used as a reference. I will point out, however, that all CA teachers were required to sign a statement that they read this carefully and understood everything in it. Oh dear.